EXHIBITION: A NEW REAL
BLEUR is pleased to announce A New Real, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Mattia Guarnera. This new body of work reflects on how our understanding of the real has shifted in an era shaped by mediation, algorithms, and relentless visual circulation.
Repositioning Hal Foster’s text ‘The Return of the Real’ within today’s hyper-mediated landscape, Guarnera suggests that truth no longer emerges from authenticity but from mediation made tangible.
Working with fragments of digital debris, from YouTube replays and WorldStar fight videos to Pinterest archives and the algorithmic circulation of street culture, he collects fleeting moments that might otherwise vanish in the endless scroll. Emerging from an experience that is layered rather than direct, filtered through feeds, clips, and screens and compressed into endlessly repeating loops, his distinct airbrush technique transforms these references into haunting compositions.
The subjects, Black and mostly male, occupy a space of intimacy, contradiction, and complexity. They carry both the artist’s projections and those imposed by a culture that persistently frames Blackness through spectacle or stereotype. Blurred, cropped, or partially obscured, they recall the low-resolution footage from which they emerge, images never meant to be held still. Guarnera stabilises these frames inviting viewers to consider how the body is consumed, circulated, and projected upon within the global image economy.
A New Real traces the dualities of contemporary experience: clear and vague, digital and real, distance and vulnerability. These works mirror a world where physical and virtual life fold into one continuum, and where meaning forms in the in-between. By re-materialising images shaped by algorithmic logics, Guarnera grounds them again in surface and touch. Within that act, a new kind of real takes shape, where fast circulation and mediation becomes visible and stubbornly human again.
Exhibition Dates: 18 December 2025 – 3 January 2026
Opening / Private View: 17 December 2025, 6–11pm
Press Enquiries: info@bleurart.com